And Now A Warren-Sexism Corrective From Cathy Young

Some new links therein about more silly postmortems (Ella Nilsen and Li Zhou at Vox, and Connie Schultz), and good reminders about how all personalized criticism and bashing isn't a sign of sexism (Ted Cruz particularly seems to attract this sort of thing). As ever, excellent work from Cathy Young.

The Inevitable, Vacant Charge Of "Sexism" In Elizabeth Warren Postmortems

Katie Herzog (@kittypurrzog on Twitter) has done me the solid of cataloguing at least some of the "Elizabeth Warren didn't win because, sexism" balderdash you just knew would be rolling in following Warren's conceding the race. (Emboldening mine below.)

The feeling is nicely summed up by Jason Stanley, professor of philosophy at Yale and author of How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them. "To repeat the obvious: there is no other explanation except for misogyny for what has happened to Senator Warren this year," Stanley tweeted after Warren suffered across-the-board losses on Super Tuesday. He called this "profoundly depressing."

This feeling was mirrored by feminist writer Jessica Valenti, who wrote in an essay that Warren had been "outright erased and ignored" by both media and voters. "Don't tell me this isn't about sexism," Valenti wrote. "I've been around too long for that." Sure, Warren may have been the most exhaustively covered female candidate since Hillary Clinton, and she may have one of the biggest war chests in the race, and she may have had among the most stage time at the debates, but still! She lost. The only explanation is that she's been systematically ignored and erased.

Valenti, one of the most predictable hacks out there, was hardly the only individual to make this spurious and risible cause the basis for Warren's failure to catch fire. In addition to those mentioned above, a few more:

• Warren herself:
  

  "Gender in this race, you know, that is the trap question for every woman. If you say, 'yeah, there was sexism in this race,' everyone says 'whiner,'" she said. "And if you say, 'no, there was no sexism,' about a bazillion women think, 'what planet do you live on?''"

• Emily Stewart in Vox:
  

  There’s no clear answer as to why she didn’t succeed and why her campaign, while resonating with millions of voters, didn’t quite get there. Misogyny is almost certainly an element — many Americans still question whether a woman can win the White House, and thus far, a woman hasn’t. And Warren’s campaign in some ways exemplified the challenges women face in so many aspects of life: They often have to work harder and gather more credentials to even attempt to reach the same heights as men, and even then, there’s no guarantee of success.

• Hanh Nguyen in Salon:

  "We had all that this time, right?" said Yang. "And it looks like America is not going to elect her, which really comes down to me, to a recognition that whatever we want to claim, gender is at the core of this. It may not be deliberate. It may not be that people outright say they cannot imagine supporting a woman or having a woman president. But when the going gets tough, when there's concern about electability, when there is a push-comes-to-shove around priority, things still seem to line up the same way. And that soft bigotry, that soft filtering, that consistently I think serves as the toughest of glass ceilings for women to raise."
  
  [Actress Sara] Gorsky also holds this belief. "I think that she faced an enormous amount of sexism and misogyny that's inherent in the system and in everyday voters still in America, which is hugely disappointing to me," she said. "I think the media painted a picture of a candidate who 'couldn't do it' and couldn't be elected. It breaks my heart that the media sent that message and that Americans seemed to receive it."

• Megan Garber in The Atlantic:

  Kate Manne, a philosopher at Cornell University, describes misogyny as an ideology that serves, ultimately, to reinforce a patriarchal status quo. “Misogyny is the law-enforcement branch of patriarchy,” Manne argues. It rewards those who uphold the existing order of things; it punishes those who fight against it. It is perhaps the mechanism at play when a woman puts herself forward as a presidential candidate and finds her attributes—her intelligence, her experience, her compassion—understood as threats. It is perhaps that mechanism at play when a woman says, “I believe in us,” and is accused of being “self-righteous.”

You really could do this all day, although I note with some interest that Jezebel has surprisingly failed to level this charge in their coverage, to their credit. The simple, obvious rejoinder to this idiocy is that Hillary Clinton won the Democratic primaries as their standard-bearer in 2016, and why are Democrats such sexists now? It says a great deal about the state of the Democratic polity that this is such a go-to answer for any and all of Warren's failings. As Herzog put it, "Warren's followers are both primed to see sexism everywhere and so enamored with their candidate—so sure of her (and their own) righteousness—that they are unable to see any of the flaws that are so apparent to anyone outside their bubble."

Update: It occurred to me that we have seen this exact, data-free approach before, with two other female candidates in the 2020 presidential race:

•  Kamala Harris herself in an HBO interview after she suspended her campaign:

  Harris: Essentially is America ready for a woman, and a woman of color, to be president of the United States?
  Margaret Talev: America was ready for a black man to be president of the United States.
  Harris: And this conversation happened for him. There is a lack of ability, or a difficult — a difficulty in imagining that someone who we have never seen can do a job that has been done forty-five times by someone who is not that person.

• Kirsten Gillibrand: "Gillibrand’s exit is particularly significant – and betrays a worrying anti-feminist undercurrent within the Democratic Party."

Yet it's truly hard to find similar charges leveled at the voters for rejecting Amy Klobuchar, Marianne Williamson, or Tulsi Gabbard. (I did manage to pick up a piece complaining about differential media treatment of Klobuchar in Politico, but it has yet to be raised as a justification for her campaign's dissolution.) The idea that the press coverage is aimed at the audience has never been more apt.

The Non-Invisibility Of Elizabeth Warren

I have previously written about the cesspit that is The Root, particularly its perceived profitability versus sister G/O Media outlet, Jezebel. Unless you like stale intersectional dogma delivered with a heaping helping of snark, there’s little inside that dank cave for anyone searching for fresh insights on racial matters.

Recently, a new essay by Michael Harriot on the subject of the Democratic primary generally and Elizabeth Warren hove into view, "Elizabeth Warren Exists". This one is so bad that it may have actually lowered my already basement-level opinion of Harriot as a journalist.

At this point, we need to take a brief detour into Harriot's recent coverage, and one story in particular. Harriot, you may recall, was late to writing about the Sarah Braasch "napping-while-black" non-incident; The Root's first installment came from Anne Branigin, a story that mostly pulls from the Yale Daily News piece. Harriot's first piece on July 20, 2018, "Woman Who Called Police on 2 Black Yale Students Says She's 'Done Absolutely Nothing Wrong' in Whitest Tweets Ever", manages to be both snarky and uncharitable to Braasch. (By contrast, Cathy Young's report covering the incident and fallout in The Bulwark gets the details that Harriot missed or refused to learn: that Braasch called campus police on a black non-resident in the dorm, Lolade Siyonbola, napping in a common room that was off-limits to outsiders. Siyonbola had a reason to extract revenge on Braasch for earlier calling police to break up a loud party on her dorm level. It was not, as Harriot and much of the outside press insisted, simply a matter of Braasch calling the police on a black person in the wrong place.) For reasons only he knows, he later called Braasch a "swamptwat", which is of a piece with former Gawker Media properties: if you can't be good, be snarky.

This is a pattern with Harriot, who fancies himself a connoisseur of what he labels "wypipo" (white people); he once made a defense of this racist expression of contempt which boils down to, only power plus prejudice can equal racism. As the Twitter account @neontaster once put it, "If you can't be racist against white people, then why are you trying so hard?" The answer to this question is that there's coin to be made, albeit not as much as women trying to plump their victimhood scores, which latter is over half again more profitable. Writing about matters racial with snark and verve doesn't have to be an exercise in unalloyed hate, something Gustavo Arellano showed us with his syndicated "¡Ask A Mexican!" column; he gave back as good as he got from racist idiots, but the genuinely curious (and polite) received thoughtful replies in Spanish-infused English. It is a model Harriot plainly rejects in favor of intersectional pugilism.

So, back to Warren. Warren, we learn, is invisible in the media, by which I presume Harriot means the TV punditry. A recent New York Times story expanded on this, mentioning her absence in a NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll as well: the poll asked about head-to-heads with other leading candidates versus Donald Trump — but not Warren. To some degree, Warren has only herself to blame for this state of affairs. Despite being fourth in overall fundraising among Democratic candidates (and second if you omit self-funders Tom Steyer and Michael Bloomberg), Warren badly trails both Steyer and Bloomberg in ad spending — but also trails Bernie. What is she doing with her war chest? Saving it for Super Tuesday? Running a sham campaign so she can guarantee her reelection as senator from Massachusetts?

But of course the main reason why Warren might prove invisible is her showing thus far, winning a grand total of eight delegates. Of course, this is after only two states have rendered results, so it's hardly a representative sample. Warren hasn't drawn the same level of interest as Bernie, either, at least if you count Google searches:

Looking at news results, Google News shows 72,600,000 for "Elizabeth Warren" versus 107,000,000 for "Bernie Sanders", which is maybe more encouraging, but also broadly tracks the Google search results as well. What accounts for this state of affairs? I don't know, but I would speculate it's a number of things:

• She has Hillary Clinton's technocratic iciness, although I do think Warren's a better politician. Both had or have very long and detailed policy lists that can be off-putting.
• Warren hasn't had to win a state outside cobalt blue Massachusetts, so her success elsewhere is open to question. (But then, so is Bernie's.)
• Warren's virtue-signaling. This is an absolute guess, but her bid to give a veto to the Secretary of Education to a transgender kid smacks of political grandstanding she has no intention of implementing in office. Likewise her wealth tax that Peter Suderman called "probably unconstitutional" and a "stunt policy" that Sweden and most other countries adopting it eventually repealed when it failed to produce the promised revenues. She would also pursue a flatly unconstitutional program threatening social media companies for permitting protected speech on their websites.

Overall, things are not looking up for Warren. Recent polling shows her with less than half of Sanders' totals (24% to 6% in South Carolina, and 30% vs. 12% in Nevada) in the next two primary states. Even a Sanders/Warren unity ticket would not work, as national polls together show they don't make up even 50% of Democrats. It's a long road to November, and there's a strong chance Warren won't even complete the run of primaries. Harriot, incurious, fails to ask why black voters pulled the lever in greater numbers for Trump in 2016 than for Romney in 2012. Absent a historic candidate, it seems likely an enervated black electorate (and the presence of someone like Mayor Stop-And-Frisk) might possibly not change matters much.

More Link Dumping

• Annie Wilkes, Part 1: Ford vs. Ferrari: now the subject of one of those Annie Wilkes reviews. "Best left dead", sheesh.
• The best thing The Federalist has published all year: "Climate Worship Is Nothing More Than Rebranded Paganism". Excerpt:

  The reality is, of course, completely different. Much less than destroying the planet, climate change isn’t even a settled science. Conservatives don’t disagree that climate is changing. That is a straw man. Conservatives, however, are opposed to hysteria, have skepticism about the rate of the climate change, and would like to see an actual cost-benefit analysis of the radical changes being demanded.
  
  More important than that, conservatives understand that climate change is cynically used by a certain section of people to justify their political goals of steering the West away from its way of life, a way they perceive to be evil and harmful, hetero-patriarchal, and capitalist. How? Appealing to the faith-based part of human brains, the need for subservience, and propping up children as human shields.

• California de facto bans fracking by making all new wells subject to a "scientific" (read: captive of the greens) panel. 
• Annie Wilkes, Part 2: Annie Blames The Audience:  No, really, Elizabeth Blanks has preemptively blamed men if her Charlie's Angels reboot fails.
  

  She stated, “Look, people have to buy tickets to this movie, too. This movie has to make money.” She added, “If this movie doesn’t make money it reinforces a stereotype in Hollywood that men don’t go see women do action movies.”

  This is an odd place to go given recent successes with Wonder Woman, Captain Marvel, and Mad Max: Fury Road. The 2000 reboot took in $125M at the domestic box office, so maybe it's just you, Liz?
• Annie Wilkes, Part 3, Corncob Edition:

  Wow. Nearly 3000 replies because one woman voices her opinion that we shouldn’t be at a point anymore where we just accept media that normalizes patriarchy. Cool cool cool. Everyone’s having a normal one I see. pic.twitter.com/N8vMHJZ09e

  — Anita Sarkeesian (@anitasarkeesian) November 21, 2019

• I am glad to see our courts beavering away at the important question of whether women can consent to a threesome. And to think, this poor man almost had his freedom snatched away from him.
• Elizabeth Warren fires the opening shot in banning cars:

  Traffic violence kills thousands and injures even more Americans every year. On World Day of Remembrance for Traffic Crash Victims, I'm sending my love to the families and friends of those who have lost loved ones. It's time to #EndTrafficViolence.

  — Elizabeth Warren (@ewarren) November 17, 2019

• Sully gets it right again on the intersectional left's long-term political goals:

  Every now and again, it’s worth thinking about what the intersectional left’s ultimate endgame really is — and here it strikes me as both useful and fair to extrapolate from Kendi’s project. They seem not to genuinely believe in liberalism, liberal democracy, or persuasion. They have no clear foundational devotion to individual rights or freedom of speech. Rather, the ultimate aim seems to be running the entire country by fiat to purge it of racism (and every other intersectional “-ism” and “phobia”, while they’re at it). And they demand “disciplinary tools” by unelected bodies to enforce “a radical reorientation of our consciousness.” There is a word for this kind of politics and this kind of theory when it is fully and completely realized, and it is totalitarian.

  Also, homosexuals are now under attack by — wait for it — the woke left, for the crime of not hewing to the trans lobby's worldview:

  Of course, anyone can and should like whatever they like and do whatever they want to do. But if a gay man doesn’t want to have sex with someone who has a vagina and a lesbian doesn’t want to have sex with someone who has a dick, they are not being transphobic. They’re being — how shall I put this? — gay. When Rich suggests that “it’s not just possible but observable and prevalent to have ‘preferences’ that dog-whistle bigotry,” and he includes in the category of “preferences” not liking the other sex’s genitals, he’s casting a moral pall over gayness itself. Suddenly we’re not just being told homosexuality is “problematic” by the religious right, we’re being told it by the woke left.

• I Am Shocked, Shocked That Mothers Want To Be With Their Children, but this apparently is huge news to the New York Times. A study of California, which in 2004 instituted mandatory paid maternity leave, found women worked fewer hours and earned less a decade later, results that are consistent with the results in Sweden, where the labor pool is the most sex-segregated in the OECD.

The Dumb Conservative Response To Student Loan Forgiveness — And The Smart One

Elizabeth Warren’s weak showing in the polls, lackluster fundraising, and late resignation of her campaign finance director make it obvious she’s got questionable staying power in the 2020 field. So, in an effort to remain relevant, she’s pitching mass student loan forgiveness. This is an appallingly dumb idea, mainly due to moral hazard:

• What’s to prevent someone from borrowing the covered amount going forward, regardless of whether they need it, and then sticking Uncle Sucker with the bill?
• What’s to keep institutions from further raising prices knowing they get paid up to the forgiveness limit?
• Why should the public pay for an increasingly uneconomic service when the providers have zero incentive to economize and reduce fees?
• What about debt contracted for private institutions? Won’t there be tremendous pressure to pay those debts off, too (regardless of the socioeconomic status of the families attending them)?

Unfortunately, Philip Klein’s response in the Washington Examiner is not just wrong-headed, but politically naive. His argument can be summarized as, you bought it with borrowed money, you pay it back. I’m in favor of enforcing the sanctity of contracted debt. I further agree with him that debt forgiveness as Warren outlined is a public financing catastrophe. But this response is bad as a matter of both moral clarity and practical politics.

1. The creep of mandatory college degrees even for relatively low-level employment kneecaps the  idea that somehow, people should just suck it up and pay. This needs to change, and perhaps there are signs that it is, but if a degree is a prerequisite to having a career, this is very thin gruel.
2. Universities are owned and operated by Democrats. This is a rare opportunity for Republicans to make the point that Democrats do not care about the people they supposedly serve. The growth of the administrative state inside universities has been fueled by easy college loans. This same bureaucracy administers unjust Title IX star chambers. Their salaries drive endless tuition hikes. Their annual tuition hikes make college unaffordable, and shackle young people with appalling levels of debt, preventing them from buying homes and starting families (in part).
3. Hacking away at the administrative state means clearing entrenched political opponents. As I’ve pointed out before, a rationalization of tuition costs will necessarily mean a reduction in certain majors. Grievance Studies majors will almost certainly be on that short list.

The better response — one which expands on my idea of bankruptcy as a means for fixing the college debt crisis — comes from Kevin Williamson in National Review. His approach, basically, is even more draconian: get rid of college loans altogether.

Here is a three-part plan for something practical the federal government could do to relieve college-loan debt. Step 1: The federal government should stop making college loans itself and cease guaranteeing any such loans. Step 2: It should prohibit educational lending by federally regulated financial institutions or, if that seems too heavy-handed, require the application of ordinary credit standards in any private educational lending, treating the student himself as the main credit risk in all cases, including those of secured or unsecured loans taken out by parents or other third parties for that student’s educational expenses. And 3: It should make student-loan debt dischargeable in ordinary bankruptcy procedures.

This is, of course, sure to meet with howls of protest from the universities, who see the gravy train screeching to a halt. Well, good. It’s about time.